What the Sharing Economy Needs Is a Little Less Democracy

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What the Sharing Economy Needs Is a Little Less Democracy

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epSos.de

Digital utopianism runs through Silicon Valley like water down the Mississippi. But the rhetoric reaches even higher levels than usual when the tech cognoscenti start talking about "the sharing economy." An app that puts strangers in your apartment when you're not in it or in your car when you're not driving is a seductive proposition. For engineers and designers weaned on the idea of efficiency as the key to better living, sharing just makes so much sense.

The most breathtaking example of that idealism in action to date may be Uber's latest financing round – a $258 million shot-in-the-arm led by Google Ventures. The deal has sparked fantasies of Uber as the platform for a fleet of self-driven Google delivery trucks that take down Amazon by bringing you anything you crave with the tap of an app.

Despite all the talk – and the cash behind it – the floodgates have not opened where it matters. Most people don't list their homes or apartments on AirBnb or use Uber to get from place to place. Particularly here in the U.S., the idea of sharing runs headlong into the ideology of owning. Commodity fetishism reigns supreme. We identify with the stuff that's ours.

The success of the sharing economy depends on the degree to which a culture of using versus owning triumphs over the deeply ingrained consumerist notion of our stuff as an extension of ourselves. While the first generation of digital natives may feel comfortable sharing every aspect of their online lives, it's hard tell to whether they'll be anywhere near as comfortable sharing their possessions offline.

"We need to clearly understand how the sociology of sharing evolves," says Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Businesses whose recent research focuses on the sharing economy. Sundararajan says that the act of sharing a possession such as your car or apartment changes the meaning of that thing.

In a sense, it's no longer just "yours." The question that intrigues him is whether using an app such as Uber to summon a ride every now and then acts as a gateway toward embracing a broader culture of sharing. If people use Uber, are they more likely to take the next step and share their own vehicle through a peer-to-peer car-sharing service like RelayRides?

"We've got the technology to change our patterns of consumption," he says. "But to what extent will we?"

Maybe the problem is too much democracy. The promise of the sharing economy is typically framed as a bottom-up, grassroots effort. Individuals make independent decisions to share their possessions and their time and together create a groundswell that overturns the dominant paradigm.

Perhaps the more efficient way to move mainstream consumer culture towards more sharing is from the top down.

In other words, the sharing economy works better if your boss makes you.

That's the premise of Local Motion, which today announced $6 million in funding from venture capital kingpin Andreessen Horowitz. The Silicon Valley-based startup installs a small piece of hardware inside the cars and trucks used by corporations, city governments, and universities. The idea is that – rather than different parts of a large institution operating their own cars, cars that mostly sit idle in parking lots – the organization can open up its whole fleet to the entire staff.

Just look for a car with a green LED, swipe your ID card (the same one you use to unlock the door to your office), and drive off. "The trick is to provide an experience that's better than the experience of owning your car," says Local Motion co-founder Clément Gires.

Local Motion's pitch is that within as little as a week, the data collected on vehicle usage can tell fleet managers how many cars and trucks wind up sitting in the parking lot – in other words, what percentage of the fleet goes unused (Gires says typically 30 percent). Institutions can shed those cars and save money. In the meantime, workers are eased into the idea of vehicles as shared resources.

"We don't have the cultural hurdle of taking the car from someone's garage," Gires says.

As part of its funding news, Local Motion announced that new Andreessen Horowitz hire and former Microsoft Windows chief Steven Sinofsky would be joining its board. Sinofsky says his first job is to help Local Motion scale to larger and larger organizations. As that happens, he and Gires say the definition of "fleet" starts to expand. Corporations begin sharing vehicles among themselves. Then neighborhoods.

The ever-increasing density and dysfunction of urban mobility makes sharing imperative, if not inevitable, Sinofsky says. "Whatever path we're on isn't going to work anymore," he says.

Maybe so. But the more important question then becomes how to get to something that does work. Silicon Valley may prize the invisible hand; however, it's also not above a little hand-holding to lead the rest of us toward its vision of communal consumption.